Amy Bauer

Ph.D., Yale University, 1997, M.M. University of Wisconsin, Madison, B.M. St. Norbert College

Amy Bauer's research focuses on twentieth-century music, especially the music of György Ligeti, spectral music and issues surrounding the reception and analysis of contemporary music.

Amy Bauer has published on the music of Ligeti, Messiaen, the television musical, and on issues in the reception and theory of modernist music. In addition she has given papers at national and international conferences on the music of Miles Davis, Mary Lou Williams, opera, television serials and cross-cultural issues in twentieth century music. Her monographLigeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (Ashgate, Nov. 2011) provides a critical analysis of the composer's works, considering both the compositions themselves and the larger cultural implications of their reception. She both synthesizes and challenges the prevailing narratives surrounding the composer's long career and uses the theme of lament to inform a discussion of specific musical topics, including descending melodic motives, passacaglia and the influence of folk music. But Ligeti 'laments' in a larger sense; his music fuses rigour and sensuality, tradition and the new and influences from disparate high and low cultures, with a certain critical and ironic distance, reflected in his spoken commentary as well as in the substance of his music. The notions of nostalgia, exoticism and the absolute are used to relate works of different eras and genres, along with associated concepts of allegory, melancholy, contemporary subjectivity and the voice.

Prior to joining the faculty at UC Irvine Bauer taught at Washington University, West Chester University, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Undergraduate music theory and analysis, graduate analysis, critical theory and philsophy of music, various topics in post-1945 music, rhythmic theory, Schenkerian analysis, history of theory, cross-cultural influences in music, world music, theory of non-Western music, readings in contemporary music theory.

"Genre as émigré: the return of the repressed in Ligeti's Second String Quartet," Rootedness and Cosmopolitanism: Ligeti’s Cultural Identities, edited by Amy Bauer and Márton Kerékfy (Ashgate, forthcoming)

“The mysteries of Selma, Alabama”: re-telling and revelation in David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” ‘Great American Opera’: Trends in American musical theatre, Gregory Herzfeld and Frédéric Döhl (Münster and New York: Waxman-Verlag, forthcoming)

“Nonrepetition and Personal Style in the Solis and Inventions,” Carlos Chávez and His World (Princeton University Press, forthcoming)

“Canon as agent of revelation in the music of Ligeti,” in Contemporary Music and Spirituality, Sander van Maas and Robert Sholl, eds. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2015)